From the you don't have to be a genius file …

David Graeber, the author of our forthcoming book about the economy, Debt: The First 5,000 Years, takes issue in a Daily Newscommentary with the way politicians talk about debt, which is why we wanted him to write a book on the subject. To wit:

We have to live within our means. That’s what President Obama repeatedly tells us, echoing a point Republicans have been making for years. Like households, governments must husband our resources and balance our budgets, or future generations will surely pay.

There’s a problem here. The analogy is ridiculous. Government budgets – and the U.S. budget in particular – are absolutely nothing like a household budget.

Graeber, an anthropologist and an anarchist, goes on to delineate some of the differences apparently invisible to economists, including:

Households can’t levy taxes.

When households owe money, they owe it to other people. The U.S. debt is owed mainly to ourselves.

When households owe money to other people, they can’t just print it. The government can.

Of course, as Graeber continues, “There’s every reason to believe politicians know all this — that in private, they’d tend to agree with Dick Cheney‘s famous assessment: ‘Deficits don’t matter.'” Still, he observes, that doesn’t stop them from “telling us that when it comes to their solemn promises to the rest of us — for instance, Social Security and Medicare — they just don’t have the money…”

Below Graeber participates in a teach-in about the banking system at two Bank of America branches in New York City.